Could a computer scientist build a brain?

# Summary Researchers propose framing brain development as an engineering problem: How can a genome-sized program (about 1 gigabyte) instruct a single cell to build a brain with billions of neurons within developmental timeframes? By analyzing the computational constraints—the genome is too small to encode per-synapse wiring and development time is too limited for random axon searching—computer scientists find that the algorithmic solutions converge on strategies that organisms actually use, suggesting brain development may be grounded in computational necessity rather than evolutionary contingency alone.